Welcome to the "Better Botanical Business Bureau", where botanical mistakes in commercial and public venues and products are showcased and corrected. It is not unusual with products, ingredients, and images used in media, design, and commercial works to be presented with the wrong common names, wrong species names, and/or wrong ingredients. This blog provides scientific and educational information to correct such mistakes as part of a global effort to increase botanical knowledge.

Saturday, February 24, 2018

Who knew!? According to a recent press release headline, plants apparently came from outer space and landed on Earth... at least if you believe a recent press release from University of Bristol about just published botanical research results by some of their researchers (February 19, 2018). If you then go on to read the research paper, you realize that the study they cite is really about LAND plants colonizing terrestrial areas, which sometimes are called earth, land, soil... any area above water. So this story is not about all plants, it is not about all of planet Earth; it is about LAND PLANTS and TERRA FIRMA.

Screenshot of press release from University of Bristol, by BotanicalAccuracy.com (fair use).

This headline conjures up an image of some green plant aliens with seed and spore bomb landing on planet Earth 100 million years earlier than some unspecificed time.

Let's dig a little deeper in the press release.

"A new study on the timescale of plant evolution, led by the University
of Bristol, has concluded that the first plants to colonise the Earth
originated around 500 million years ago – 100 million years earlier than
previously thought. ."

INCORRECT. What is a plant? Is a plant just land plants? If
so, then what are green algae? Again, what the authors mean here are
land plants, not all plants. Land plants are green organisms that we find in terrestrial environments, from tiny mosses to giant Sequoias (not counting some terrestrial green algae). Some green algae (streptophytes) are more closely related to land plants
than to other green algae (chlorophytes, yes, biological reality is complicated).

The ancestors to land plants were ancient green algae from the streptophyte group, and green algae
still live
mostly in aquatic environments, both in seawater and freshwater. If you
agree that we should classify life on Earth in groups that reflect their
evolutionary relationships, then organisms from the red algae + green algae + land plants
form a solid, good group for classification, simply called the Plants or Plantae (see the evolutionary tree below).

How plants have evolved... a little simplified, but rather scientifically correct...
by Maulucioni - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, Source

However,
an alternative explanation to this mistake in this press release is that the writers of this
press
release still followed the old 5-kingdom classification of life. This system has been
shown
over and over to not be correct evolutionarily, and therefore has been
abandoned by
modern researchers and taxonomists. The earlier system included ANIMALS, FUNGI, PLANTS, ALGAE, PROTISTS for the eukaryotes - and the Algae group has been shown to be a messy grab-bag of unrelated groups. If this is what happened, then it is time for a knowledge update
for these scientists and the public - new information
is always interesting and fun and fascinating, and science is about progress and increased knowledge and changes based on new data, so there is no excuse to hold on to old hypotheses and systems.
Teaching the public
about new taxonomic results and changes, including the difference (and
similarites) between
the closely related fungi
and animals, or, explaining that the old groups 'Protists'
and 'Algae' are a mish-mash grab bag of unrelated organisms that should
not be classified together, is what scientists and journalist should do
- it should be part of our job descriptions and job expectations.
There is no need and no excuse to hold
on to outdated information if you care about scientific accuracy. There
is also no way we as individuals can keep ourselves updated on all new
information that is coming out of science on a daily basis; that is why
we turn to experts for fact checking and updates. Change, corrections,
and updates should be welcome in science, and it is part of the
scientific process and its progress.

Then comes,

"For the first four billion years of Earth’s history, our planet’s continents would have been devoid of all life except microbes."

PROBABLY NOT. Well, it depends on what you consider 'continents' and 'microbes'. Eukaryotes (living things that are not bacteria or archaea, and not viruses either) are known from at least 1.5 billion years ago, first as single-celled organisms and later as multi-cellular critters and plants (from maybe 800 million years ago, at least). The Earth is estimated to be 4.6 billion years old, that means there might have been eukaryotes in terrestrial environments even if we haven't found fossils of them yet. They simply might have been too small, not had shells or hard cell walls or other body parts that fossilize well, or not left many traces after themselves. There certainly was a lot of non-microbial life on continental shelves and in marine environments before 600 million years ago.

"All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their pond scum
relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that animals
would later invade."

PARTIALLY TRUE. What is pond scum? That also depends. It can be green algae (chlorophytes) or cyanobacteria that form a foamy filmy layer on top of stagnant pond water. Green algae are a group of plants that are closely related to land plants (which are mosses, liverworts, conifers, ferns, and flowering plants, plus a couple of other small groups). But cyanobacteria are photosynthetic bacteria and have been around for many billions of years. Land plants also had and have a lot of relatives that are not associated with pond scum, for example sea lettuce, stoneworts, spirogyra, and gutweed (all from the two green algal groups, the chorophytes and the charophytes).
And for the record, there are fossils of animal tracks that are older than the known land plant fossils. There are so few terrestrial fossils that it is really hard to know what happened and when and in which order. The fungi (and symbiotic lichens) also seem forgotten in this press release, since they are also known from the earliest terrestrial environments. (Fungi are not plants, they are their own branch, closely related to animals, maybe something to be considered by vegetarians.)

"The timing of this episode has previously relied on the oldest fossil plants which are about 420 million years old."

"Our results show the ancestor of land plants was alive in the middle
Cambrian Period, which was similar to the age for the first known
terrestrial animals.”

CORRECT, BUT... (note how the land plants finally enter the story). Ancestors, evolutionary speaking, is not just one organism at one time. Ancestors and their extinct species and populations are lining up as a string of organismal pearls back into the distant, forgotten past. And if we continue to follow the
ancestral lineages back in time for plants, it ends up at the common
ancestor of all living things, common to bacteria to humans, to wolves, sea
cucumbers and molds, and for magnolias and mosses and moths. The common ancestor for land plants only, that is different, that is the ancestral (and extinct) organism that is the closest ancestor to the now living land plants.

HOW TO FIX? To fix the problems in this press release would be really easy, and here is my suggestion (new or changed words in red and bold):

Title: Land Plants colonized Earth 100 million years earlier than previously thought
A new study on the
timescale of land plant evolution, led by the University of Bristol, has
concluded that the first plants to colonise land originated around
500 million years ago – 100 million years earlier than previously
thought. For the first four billion years of Earth’s history, our planet’s terrestrial areas would have been devoid of all life except microbes and other small organisms. All of this changed with the origin of land plants from their aquatic green algae relatives, greening the continents and creating habitats that
animals would later invade. The timing of this episode has previously relied on the oldest fossil land plants which are about 420 million years old. New research, published today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA,
indicates that these events actually occurred a hundred million years
earlier, changing perceptions of the evolution of the Earth’s biosphere. Land plants are major contributors to the chemical weathering of
continental rocks, a key process in the carbon cycle that regulates
Earth’s atmosphere and climate over millions of years.

It would also have been nice if scientific names would have been italicized in the press release, as is custom in biology. (See this previous blog post)

WHY CARE? When science is
communicated to the public, it is not only important that it is correct,
but also that it is understandable by a broad audience. Clearly defined words and simplicity is
necessary, but it absolutely needs to be correct. Otherwise it turns
into botanical fake news that mislead the public and upset scientists.
To assume that people only think about land plants when you use the word
'plants' assumes that the public does not know about green algae in
oceans or in lakes, you ignore current scientific data, and it also shows that you as a scientist or
journalist do not care about the details that build the real story.

As scientists, we often get frustrated when there are
factual inaccuracies in how our research results and scientific facts
are portrayed by non-scientists. In this case though, it was the home
institution of the research team that introduced these mistakes and inaccuracies in their own press release, and then, assuming it was of course correct, it was picked up by news media. This is highly unusual.
More often it is a journalist without much scientific knowledge that
introduces errors or simplifies too much from a press release that was accurate to begin with.

Sometimes seemingly simple omissions (plants / land plants) and capitalization (Earth / earth) really makes a big difference, as shown in this story. ScienceDaily picked up the story from the press release as is, as did Phys.org, Sci-News, Astrobiology Magazine. But look at BBC, and Atlas Obscura, and Science Magazine - they use the wording 'land plants' and have accurate information in their articles that were not direct copies of the press release. Kudos to them!

Note. One person at the University of Bristol was contacted before this
story was written and published on BotanicalAccuracy.com, and this person declined to
reconsider word choices or make suggested corrections in the press release.

It is also important to note that the issues highlighted in this blog post are only present in the press
release from University of Bristol, not in the research paper itself, nor in the quotes from the
scientists in the press release. So it is the dissemination of the research results that is the problematic issue here, not the research itself.

For more reading on plants and algae, I recommend this recent blogpost:Are algae plants? from the In Defense of Plants blog

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Countries, states, and provinces around the world often select symbolic things to represent their place and these are often considered typical for that region. The US has the bald eagle as their symbolic country bird, and New Jersey (in US) has the oak as their state tree. Each province ('landskap') in Sweden has a province plant, for example the white waterlily is the 'landskapsblomma' (province flower) of the Södermanland. The same Swedish province also has a selected a moss (hart's-tongue thyme-moss), an animal (osprey), a fish (bream), a mushroom (black trumpet mushroom), an insect (the striped shield bug), and a rock ( special type of gneiss).

Many states in the United States have also selected foods, vegetables, animals, arts, fossils, insects, festivals, holidays as their special state symbols (see list here). Sometimes this misses the mark, when selected species or objects do not really fit into their category based on biological or other definitions. In this blogpost series I will present a few of these cases.

Botanical illustration of white pine from Bauer's book A Description of the Genus Pinus
made by A. B. Lambert. (PD-public domain, Wikimedia, NYBG.)

State Flower of Maine:
Unfortunately for Maine, the selected state flower in 1895, the white pine (Pinus strobus), do not have flowers. It doesn't belong to the flowering plants, instead it is a conifer. Conifers don't have carpels and they don't produce fruits, and they don't have sepals, petals, ovaries, or stamens. Instead the ovules are places on bracts in short whorls (this is the female strobilus, which will become a pine cone), and the male parts that shed immense amounts of pollen in the spring, are on separate male strobili that look like little dusters (sometimes called tassels). Other types of conifers are cedars, redwoods, and ginkgos. Luckily for Maine, the white pine is also the state tree since 1945, and that is botanically correct.

Tuesday, October 3, 2017

Just tonight I was looking through the most recent catalogue from LUSH, the novelty-loving skincare company from Canada, and botanical accuratist as I am, I was scanning the ingredient lists at the end of the catalogue. This is always interesting, you never know what you might find! Here is an example of the lists can look like:

One of many pages in the LUSH catalogue, listing the ingredients to their products according to the INCI database. Photo by BotanicalAccuracy.com.

All skincare ingredients follow the standardized INCI database naming system, so that all ingredients follow a particular format and have a standardized name. INCI is managed by the Personal Products Care Council who are in the process of updating scientific names that have become outdated or changed.One of the names I found was MORINGA OIL (MORINGA PTERYGOSPERMA) from the medicinal moringa plant in the family Moringaceae, not too distant from the cabbage family (Brassicaceae).

There is an excellent explanation on why Moringa pterygosperma is a name that should no longer be used on a web page by Mark E. Olson, as part of the Moringa International Germplasm Collection's Moringa Blog. In the blog post the fascinating story of how the two moringa species were discovered, described, and how one name (Moringa pterygosperma) turned out to be the same as another name (Moringa oleifera). Unfortunately both names are still in use today. If you read all the way to the end (while passing by exquisite drawings from the old original botanical works), you will get to the conclusion by Mark E. Olson:

"The summary of this story is that Moringa pterygosperma is a superfluous name for Moringa oleifera.
It is the result of an oversight of an ambitious 18th century botanist
who was working himself to exhaustion in a race against blindness.
Whatever the cause, there is no reason at all ever to use the name Moringa pterygosperma. "

So, this means that every label on a skincare product that currently lists Moringa pterygosperma as an ingredient, should change that scientific name to Moringa oleifera. This will take some time to change, but this is how scientific progress looks like in biodiversity and speciation studies. And don't buy Moringa pterygosperma thinking it is a better product than something with Moringa oleifera - the two names are the same thing.

Saturday, January 14, 2017

The scientific name of the Chinese medicinal plant called Chinese milk vetch, also called Radix Astragali, huang qi in Mandarin, or 黄芪 or 黄耆 in Chinese characters, will be decided this year. As explained in a previous blogpost, the name that has been in use for a long time, Astragalus membranaceus, is not available for use because it violates the rules of the Botanical Code. This can be fixed if the botanical community accepts an exception to the rules for this particular case.

A proposal has been submitted to conserve the name Astragalus membranaceus published by Bunge, which would make it available for this species again. The proposal will be voted on by the botanical community at the International Botanical Congress in China in Summer of 2017.

Here is the link to the blogpost with more information, with the update and details at the very end. We will report back after the decision is made - so right now the scientific name is kind of in limbo and everybody is waiting for a decision.

Tuesday, November 29, 2016

This educational and interactive image from the artichoke company Ocean Mist Farms in California on the Anatomy of an Artichoke made me scratch my head. It is stated on their website as the largest artichoke producer in the US, and has a long history growing fresh vegetables of many kinds. On their website they provide a nice interactive feature where you can slide a slider across and see the inside, the anatomy, of an artichoke:

Screenshot of Anatomy of an Artichoke on the Ocean Mist website.
Screenshot by Botanicalaccuracy.com, 29 Nov 2016 (fair use).

Unfortunately, the botanical facts about the artichoke head are not anatomically correct.
The text states:

"You may be interested to know that the Artichoke is actually the bud of a plant from the thistle family and at full maturity, the plant grows to a width of about six feet and a height of three to four. If not harvested from the plant, the bud will eventually blossom into a beautiful, blue-violet flower, which is not edible. The bud contains the Heart, the delightful, meaty core of the Artichoke, and is topped by a fuzzy center, or choke, which is surrounded by rows of petals, which protect the Artichoke Heart. With their tiny thorns, the Artichoke’s petals reveal their thistle heritage."

The artichoke is indeed a type of giant thistle, and if you let it flower it will open up to show a flower head similar to thistles, just much larger. But note the word HEAD, which is used for flower arrangements (inflorescences) that have tightly packed and unstalked flowers.

The thistles are part of the sunflower family, the Asteraceae, which is also the home of dandelions, marigolds, tarragon, mugwort, chicory, lettuce, chrysanthemum, and dahlias. All of the species in this family have tiny flowers collected in a cup- or saucer-like head (capitulum), that is surrounded on the lower side by bracts (modified small leaves). The flowers are small and tightly packed, often with tubular narrow (disc) flowers in the center and sometimes with longer, flattened (ray) flowers along the edge, like in a sunflower. One group of species have only ray flowers, like in dandelions. In thistles, there are only tubular disc flowers, and the bracts are long and initially covers the whole sides and top of the head.

So, in their effort to educate the public about the fascinating anatomy of the floral heads of artichokes, Ocean Mist Farms manages to really mix things up. Here is the corrected version of their image:

Corrected version of the screenshot of Anatomy of an Artichoke, original from Ocean Mist Farms. Modified image by Botanicalaccuracy.com. (fair use, cc-by)

Their text should read something like this instead:

"You may be interested to know that the Artichoke is actually the YOUNG FLOWER HEAD of a plant from the thistle family and at full maturity, the plant grows to a width of about six feet and a height of three to four. If not harvested from the plant, the HEAD will eventually blossom into a FLOWER HEAD WITH beautiful, blue-violet flowerS, which ARE not edible. The HEAD contains the Heart, the delightful, meaty core of the Artichoke, and is topped by a fuzzy center OF YOUNG FLOWERS, or choke, which is surrounded by rows of BRACTS, which protect the Artichoke Heart. With their tiny SPINES, the Artichoke’s BRACTS reveal their thistle heritage."

It is not too late to learn and this is not an uncommon mistake in the food world. Hopefully they fix this information soon. If you want to dig deeper into the anatomy of artichokes, I recommend this post on the Botanist in the Kitchen blog.
(Thanks to RO for sending me this example of botanical inaccuracies in commercial products and companies.)

Tuesday, November 1, 2016

The confusion in what causes hay fever allergies has been a hot topic on this blog. Despite modern medicine and pharmacology being rooted in science-based medicine, it seems that advertising for the same medical offices and pharmacological products for allergy-reduction has not gotten the same message. Here are some photos from the outside walls of the allergy clinic next to the place where I am attending a meeting this week.

Image of wall advertising seen outside allergy clinic in Chattanooga, Tennessee, showing a child blowing the fruiting head of a dandelion. (c) photo by Botanical Accuracy, 2016.

Based on these, you would think that those white nice fluffy dandelion (or thistle) fruits would have something to do with your allergies. Not so. (The dog might though.)

Most hay fevers are caused by wind-dispersed POLLEN, which comes from tiny but mighty wind-pollinated flowers, such as those present in grasses, mug worts, birches, and ragweeds. Dandelion flowers are insect pollinated (as explained here). Dandelion fruits (or commonly called 'seeds), which are actually one-seeded small nuts (a kid of fruit) with a long stalk and umbrella of hairs to fly away, are not allergenic. They just fly in the air, and gets to represent the invisible pollen that also fly in the air at the same time. Unfortunately, this make people dislike dandelions even more.

I can't help wonder if the highly educated, science-minded doctors in this office know about this mistake. Wouldn't it be interesting to do a survey to see what allergy doctors actually know about wind-pollinated plants, wind-dispersed fruits, and common allergenic plants? I think it is about time that these doctors also should point out to the pharmaceutical companies and marketing designers that 'sorry, we only do science-based advertising and prescription here'.

I know that the general skin test that you can done might come back saying that you are allergic to 'trees and weeds'. This is about as broad as saying you are allergic to 'mammals and garden pests'. It is so non-specific and inaccurate that it is not useful if you want to actually know what you are allergic to. But be sure, dandelions are not the culprit, and should not be plastered all over doctors' offices and allergy medication ads.

Sunday, August 28, 2016

The motto of The Guinness World Records is
OFFICIALLY AMAZING.And that it is,
officially amazing, but not only in the sense that they might think.When I was a kid in Sweden I loved their orange-colored book, (1975 edition, maybe?) and I read everything in it, and stared at the photos of the man with the longest nails (how did he eat?) and the largest cat, amused and entertained and informed. Now I get to come back to this memorable source of trivia, but this time for a botanical and work-related reason.

The world record for the tallest
dandelion is nearly a foot taller than most
people was found by two Canadians 2011. They had their dandelion verified by two experts in Canada (see below) and accepted by the Guinness
office as an official world record.From the Guinness website:

"The tallest dandelion measured 177.8 cm (70 in) and was found by Jo
Riding and Joey Fusco (both Canada) in Ontario, Canada. The dandelion was
measured on 12 September 2011. The dandelion was found on 4 August 2011 and was
unofficially measured at 76 in. The dandelion was then officially measured by
NutriLawn and The Weed Man on 12 September 2011 when it had dried out and was
measured as 70 in."(link)

There is no photo of the plant on the record website,
unfortunately, but there is a youtube video uploaded by JO Riding, telling the whole
story of finding and measuring of the plant.

By the time the plant was measured it had been dried for weeks, but
you can clearly see in the video that it had many leaves on its stem, and that there
were several flowers on the top of several branches.There is no clear taproot and no rosette of
basal leaves. To conclude, this was no dandelion. (And just to confirm, the Canadian botanist Luc Brouillet who wrote the Flora of North America treatment for dandelions, agrees with this conclusion. And he should know.)

There are many
species related to dandelions (genus Taraxacum)
that are similar to dandelions in having yellow flower heads and 'puffball' seed heads that eventually
blow in the wind, but they are not dandelions, they below to other genera.All of these are members of the sunflower family (scientific name
Asteraceae), and dandelion and its relatives are members of the Cichorieae (aka
Lactuceae) subgroup (=tribe) that has members with milky sap (latex) that you can see if you break a leaf or
stem.

Here is a real dandelion, a species in the genus Taraxacum. All the leaves
are in a basal rosette at the base, and from the middle of the rosette a light-colored, hollow
stem comes up and holds just one flower head.There is a big taproot under the plant that can survive year to year,
and that is why they are so hard to get rid of - you have to dig them out. It is a perennial problem - cut
the flower head stalk off with your lawn mower and it just sends up a new one from its low stem and perennial root.

And here is a weedy look-alike, but check out the
differences in the position of the leaves and the branched stems with many
flowers. This is a milk thistle
(Sonchus), which is probably what was
reported from Ottawa as the world's tallest dandelion. It is unclear if the two Ottawa companies that certified its
height, Nutri-Lawn and Weed Man, also certified its species identity, but both
companies should be very familiar with dandelions and other weedy species.Nutri-Lawn is a lawn care company specializing in "ecology friendly lawn care"
and Weed Man, another gardening company has a very funny green
man as their home page mascot. It might be that Guinness World Records didn't ask for species verification.

And then there was this UK news story this summer, Man accidentally grows the 'world's tallest dandelion plant':

"Mr Daniels is keen to get his dandelion officially
measured as soon as possible before it starts to wilt or dry out. He added: "I'm not a gardener hence why I'm growing a dandelion, it is
just luck that it has grown so big as I have done nothing to it over then let
it grow." A Guinness World Records spokesman said: "We invite the claimant to
make an application via our website in order for us to be able to ratify the
achievement."

This is not a dandelion either. All those little flower heads in a strongly branched inflorescence and the leafy stems with bluish-green leaves
with light-colored mid veins indicate that this seems to be Lactuca,
maybe prickly lettuce (Lactuca serriola). Lactuca is the same genus as your supermarket
lettuce, but this is a wild species. This is how Lactuca looks like. Some species have blue
petals, other yellow.

For the record, WeedZilla with a height of 12 feet isn't
the World's tallest dandelion either, that is something else in the sunflower
family. It is a giant weed indeed, but not a dandelion. Sorry.

The strange thing is that dandelions are not hard to identify with certainty if you
know what to look for.The book Foraging & Feasting: A Field Guide and Wild Food Cookbook by Dina Falconi includes a great 'plant map'
illustrated by Wendy Hollender
of all the good key characters for dandelions. You can also read about dandelion's
great benefits and ancient ethnobotanical uses.

I am not writing this to point out that people identify
plants wrong.That happens all the time,
and is just a matter of education, curiosity, and interest in plants that live around us.There
are plant identification forums online with over 50 000 members, and the fact
that people are curious about strange, cool, and giant plants is a great
thing.People should ask about plants,
and let themselves be amazed by them. It is OK to know little, especially if you
want to know more and satisfy your curiosity.

The problem is the fact checkers at Guinness World Records who put themselves and their company into this embarrassing situation.First, they should make sure they actually
have the right species in hand. The easiest for this is to have photos of
the plant while alive, you know 'pics or it didn't happen!'. They should also require a pressed specimen of the plant, not just air dried,
but pressed between newspaper sheets so it is preserved and flat.That way specialists can look at it later and say: "yep, you have a true dandelion!", or "sorry, that is a milk
thistle, nice plant anyway!"This is
called vouchering and is standard practice for all species reports, including
DNA testing, species inventories, herbal plant
identification, and chemical analysis. There is no reason why Guinness
World Records could not implement this, and have a botanist verify the species identification
and have a link to an actual preserved specimen (the proof).

So, what is truly the record for world's tallest dandelion? Well, there are reports out there that show real dandelion (Taraxacum
species). So far, the record seems to be the dandelion found by a Norwegian
boy, Bjørn Magne,with a 108 cm (42 inches) long flower stalk, and
reported to World Record Academy in 2007. Before then, the Guinness World Book of Records had a
39-inch tall Swedish dandelion from 2003 as a record holder.
The Nordic countries seem to be great for further giant dandelion
exploration.To inspire you, here are
some dandelions on Iceland's lava-covered plains in the never-setting sun of Nordic summers.

Dandelions on Iceland. Photo and copyright by Didrik Vanhoenacker (thanks for letting me borrow the photo).

PS. Thanks to Asteraceae specialist Torbjörn Tyler, field biologist-on-call Didrik Vanhoenacker, professor emeritus Arthur Tucker, and dandelion taxonomist LucBrouillet, who all helped and gave feedback on research for this blog post.

Thursday, August 18, 2016

It appears that New Scientist needs to rename their recent story " Without oxygen from ancient moss you wouldn’t be alive today" to something more like "Without oxygen from lichens you wouldn’t be alive today", based on their featured image. The story was posted on their website on a few days ago, and features new research findings of how the earliest land plants (bryophytes/mosses) helped put oxygen in the atmosphere; here is the webpage:

The story is based on a very interesting paper in PNAS by Timothy Lenton and colleagues at Exeter University. A science writer probably wrote up the text, but along came a photo editor, who went to a stockphoto gallery, in this case Getty images, to find a suitable image. And he/she selected a lichen, not a moss, since that 'moss' is what the photographer had written in the description. Nobody appears to have checked with the authors of the paper or any other botanists if the image was suitable or correct. (My advice for scientists is to always provide your own images for news stories, for exactly this reason.)

Screenshot from Getty Images by BotanicalAccuracy.com on 18 August 2016 of
'Close-Up of Moss on Rocks' photo (link), featuring a lichen, not a moss. Fair use.

So how to avoid mistakes like this? It would be very helpful if stock photo companies demanded accurate descriptions of photos, and if media checked the images with the people that know, not the least the authors of the paper that is featured. I can just imagine their frustration and possible horror to have their bryophyte story illustrated with a photo of a lichen, especially since there are so many gorgeous moss photos.

PS. Thanks to TT who notified me of this mistake, which hopefully will be corrected by the New Scientist editors very soon.
PS2. UPDATE: The photo is now corrected in the article in New Scientist.

Saturday, January 9, 2016

In the most recent issue of the fine cooking magazine Fine Cooking, the writers have gone out on a somewhat thin taxonomic limb.

The Brassicas article in Fine Cooking. Photo by BotanicalAccuracy.com.

So, what do they write?

"Arugula and turnips bear little resemblance to one another on the plate, so you might be surprised to learn that they both belong to the cabbage family, otherwise known as Brassica."

Well, arugula and turnips are both member of the cabbage family, but that family is called Brassicaceae, the mustard or cabbage family. Even if turnips is placed in Brassica, arugula is not, and in fact, the two commonly cultivated species of arugula are in different genera.

Yes, these are all members of the mustard family Brassicaceae, but not all are species of the Brassica genus. Brassica is one of about 375 genera in the mustard family. Some of the species listed are actually cultivars (domesticated varieties) of the same species of Brassica. And what is going on with that capitalization on common names? Lets capitalize every second word that starts with B?

So how does this all work? What is really the same genus and species of these delicious plants? There are many cultivated plants in the Brassicaceae family (the mustard family). Brassica gave its name to the family Brassicaceae, like Rosa (roses) to Rosaceae (rose family), and Poa (bluegrass) to Poaceae (grasses). All plant families have scientific names that end with '-aceae', rather convenient when you try to tell them apart from other group names.

There are many, many species and cultivars of Brassica (or brassicas, as they are sometimes called in English). The cultivated brassicas are ancient and a result of a lot of breeding, selection, and crossing of genotypes, so their taxonomy is a bit messy within Brassica itself. Sorting out the current common names, their scientific names, and classification of the brassicas has to wait for another blog post (which is in the works). But, the summary is:The Brassica genus is a member of the family Brassicaceae. Many other edible mustard plants are placed in other genera of the Brassicaceae.

Saturday, December 26, 2015

This holiday Trader Joe's have been selling 'Real Mistletoe' in cute little old fashion-inspired boxes. On the back of each box is stated "Our real mistletoe is hand harvested in the Pacific Northwest. Perserved naturally, it will last all season long. Hand from a doorway and steal a kiss from your sweetie!"

Now, the first question we would ask, is of course, is it real? Well, it is a product of nature. The plant inside the box is a real dried plant, not something molded and plastic. So yes, it is real. (Of course plastic is also real, formed by atoms and electrons and chemical bonds, etc. It all depends of your definition of 'real'.

However, this is a dried plant dipped in paint. There is no information of what the paint contains, neither does it say anywhere on the package that the mistletoe is painted. Instead it says 'preserved naturally' on the back of the package. That brings us into the sticky territory of "what is natural?". There are a lot of natural things in the world that we usually do not associate with the marketing term 'natural', such as uranium radiation, cancer, gold, DNA mutations, strychnine, and methane. Natural simply means it is something that exist in nature by itself, something we humans haven't created. There is no legal definition of natural. There is no way to know if humans created this green paint on this mistletoe, or the dye or paint was mixed by 'natural ingredients'. So, this is just another case of the use of 'natural' in marketing in a way that is ambiguous and uncertain. One thing is for certain though, a normal (natural) mistletoe has a greenish yellow or yellowish greenish color, and is never this dark green. Trader Joe's helped nature a bit with the color here.

Second, is it real mistletoe? Now it becomes a bit tricky. This is a mistletoe indeed, and mistletoes belong to a large group of species in the plant order Santalales. The one historically associated with Christmas is the European species Viscum album, but it has cultural and mythological references all the way back to Viking times). The plant in the Trader Joe box is a mistletoe, but it is not Viscum album. It is a species of Phoradendron, but which one is hard to determine due to the green paint on the leaves and flower buds. Several species of Phoradendron exist in the United States, and this is likely Phoradendron leucarpum (Santalaceae), which indeed is used as a Christmas substitute here in the United States. (It was ID'd with help from the Facebook group Plant Identification (intermediate-advanced) - Thank you!)

Yes, it is a real plant, but painted. Yes, it is mistletoe, but not the species that is historically associated with Christmas kisses. As usual, what is real really depends on your definition. And yes, it is a real mistletoe, a plant from the mistletoe order. Would I hang up this dried painted breakable mistletoe in my house? Never. In my mind, this is not at all the real mistletoe of old Christmas traditions.

For more on botanical accuracies and inaccuracies on mistletoes, here is a link to a post from earlier, explaining the difference between mistletoes and hollies.

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What is Botanical Accuracy?

Would you care if someone called a cat 'a mouse' in the description of a medieval painting?

Would you care if someone served you horse meat, but said it was beef? I bet you would.

Would you care if the wrong chemical was listed in the ingredient list of your shampoo or cereal?

Would you care if you bought one plant, but got another?

Would you care if there were species or ingredient mistakes in advertising, menus, herbal pills, and such things?

Would you care if books on plants are illustrated with the wrong plants?

If so, here is the place for you to read about such problems in the world of plants and plant products, where unfortunately such mistakes, inaccuracies, and problems are not uncommon. This is usually due to lack of botanical knowledge or expertise, or sometimes because of plain ignorance.

Inaccuracies are common when it comes to plants, because it seems like we humans care to learn less about green things like trees, flowers, and herbs than we care to learn about animals, even when we eat plants, paint them, plant them, extract their chemicals, or use them in numerous other ways.

Without plants in the world you and I certainly would be dead. Some plants can also kill you with their toxins, so it is best to know which plant is what species. Time to learn some botany!

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About mistakes, inaccuracies, and errors

Science is a process of gaining knowledge and understanding of the world around us. It is a never-ending process, and what we think are true facts today might change tomorrow. In science we are aiming for having the best understanding possible today based on what we and our predecessors have learned until now.

This means that what is botanically accurate from a scientific viewpoint might (and will) change. Other experts in the field of botany know a lot more about their particular research plants than I do. New scientific findings and conclusions are being published every day. This is just normal and part of the scientific process; we improve on our knowledge all the time.

The important thing is our willingness to continuously aim for botanical accuracy and the highest scientific standards in our use of names and facts. When things are wrong, let's correct them. Let us not perpetuate wrong botanical knowledge by accepting its incorrect use on commercial products, in everyday language, or in other parts of our contemporary cultures. Through scientific education and specific corrections we will improve botany and science for everybody, in supermarkets, restaurants, and garden centers.

It is the perpetuation of incorrect facts that are the problem, not the need for correction. Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody learns, throughout their lives. We need words to be able to communicate and talk about things, so let's use the right words and the right species names.

Undoubtedly there will be mistakes and errors on this blog, or things that need to be updated. If you want to get in touch, please e-mail me at botanicalaccuracy at gmail.com. If you see a mistake on this blog, e-mail me with the link to the post and an explanation what is incorrect and should be updated. If you represent a company and want to get in touch, please use the same e-mail address.

ABOUT THIS BLOG: Please note that posts will be updated when new information becomes available. Updates on companies that have fixed their botanical accuracies are welcome, as are newly found inaccuracies. Images posted on this blog are either copyrighted but used here under the fair use exception (as part of criticism and review of products, educational, commentary, etc.), copyrighted and used with specific permission, or have Creative Commons licenses or are available in the public domain. The mention of any product, company, or botanical ingredient and its use is not an endorsement of any kind.